Watching Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial, a movie premiering at the New York Film Festival on October 5 about the rise of Sam Altman and OpenAI, “is like watching a horror movie you happen to be living through”, says an article in Vulture, an entertainment news website and the pop culture vertical of New York Magazine. The same could be said about watching Trump’s presidency. 

As New Yorker Editor David Remnick wrote on October 12, “Because Trump is simultaneously an autocrat and a performance artist, because Americans tend to cling reflexively to the fraying notion of national exceptionalism, it is difficult to reckon with the idea that a President might be not merely shambolic and incompetent but something far darker, even evil.”

• While Trump is seeking a $1.5 trillion Pentagon authorization, he is setting up a Pentagon slush fund within the Office of Strategic Capital that is expected to be a destination for money generated by profits from the sale of Venezuelan oil, which will presumably be spent unconstrained by Congressional review. A recipe for chaos.

• In an astonishing case of political reprisal, Trump’s Justice Department is investigating whether the major television networks — ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC and Fox News — violated federal antitrust laws when the group briefly suspended their White House pool coverage. This followed a call by Laura Loomer, the far-right influencer who has often had the ear of Trump, or an antitrust investigation into TV networks for colluding “to refuse to cover President Trump”. “The trend we’re observing is profoundly undemocratic,” commented Jem Bartholomew of the Columbia Journalism Review.

• With international national security threats multiplying, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and President Trump have fired, pushed to retire, or blocked the promotions of more than two dozen senior military leaders in the past 21 months, including high profile generals, admirals, and civilian defense leaders. The latest departure was Army Secretary Dan Driscoll. The New York Times reported “…in a meeting with the president, Mr. Driscoll complained that Mr. Hegseth had fired some of the Army’s most combat-tested leaders, imperiling its efforts to modernize the force, military officials said. He also warned Mr. Trump that the firings and blocked promotions have damaged morale, causing some in the military to question the fairness of a promotion system that is supposed to be apolitical and merit-based, senior officials said.” Other departures have included: the Army’s top uniformed officer, Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George; Navy Secretary John Phelan; Army Gen. Christopher Donahue (the last U.S. soldier to leave Afghanistan); Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to serve as chief of naval operations and to become a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin; Air Force Vice Chief of Staff Gen. James Slife; the head of U.S. Southern Command, Navy Adm. Alvin Holsey; NSA director, CYBERCOM commander Gen. Timothy Haug (fired shortly after far-right activist Laura Loomer pressured Trump to fire him).

• Donald Trump’s Justice Department, which has prioritized investigating people who have investigated Trump, is reaching back in history to consider whether prosecutors mistreated an earlier Republican president: Richard Nixon, more than half a century after that scandal led to Nixon’s resignation, according to the Wall Street Journal. “The department is reviewing whether the special prosecutor’s office that investigated the famed Watergate break-in committed misconduct, according to people familiar with the matter, more than half a century after that scandal led to Nixon’s resignation.

• Trump officials are withholding updated COVID vaccines from the Vaccines for Children program, delaying access for children in at least 11 states and one U.S. territory, The Guardian reported. More than half of American children receive vaccines through the program.

• Trump consulted Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot in deciding whether to capture Nicolás Maduro. In December 2025, about a month before the U.S. invaded Venezuela and captured its president,Trump met with Elon Musk and spent hours talking to Musk’s Grok chatbot, including asking how Venezuelans would respond to the capture of their president. Grok characterized Maduro as a “deeply unpopular dictator” and said Venezuelans would celebrate his downfall, prompting Trump to conclude the chatbot was “ingenious.”

• The Trump administration is using public dollars not appropriated for that purpose to produce and pay for television adsTimes. Trump personally instructed his budget director to use taxpayer money for TV ads , according to The New York Times. The money came from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, an arm of DHS that oversees the Border Patrol and customs and immigration at airports. The Washington Sun reported that on Sept. 19, the White House Office of Management and Budget gave Customs and Border Protection $20 million for “OBBBA commemorative events.” The next day, CBP awarded the advertising company LMD Agency Inc. a contract for $20 million for a “national media campaign.” Lawmakers are pointing to the $20 million apportionment as an unauthorized use of funds, claiming the administration went around Congress to pay for an ad campaign that the law had deemed prohibited.

• Donald Trump’s Truth Social company is charging investors $100,000 for faster access to his posts announcing government policy, allowing them to trade on information before everyone else gets it, while his company makes money selling this advantage. the practice continues while 53 former federal prosecutors and agents have advised a federal court that the program likely violates federal criminal laws involving securities, conflicts of interest, and public corruption.

• The U.S. war against Iran has cost the Department of Defense more than $38 billion through Aug. 1, and will continue costing up to $3 billion a month or more depending on the intensity of this now preparing to send a third aircraft carrier strike group, led by the USS Theodore Roosevelt , to the Middle East, adding 9,000–10,000 troops to the more than 50,000 U.S. troops already in the region.

• According to Forbes, President Trump is an estimated $2.7 billion richer than when he won the 2024 election, having cashed in on crypto ventures and overseas deals. The Washington Post reported growing anger among younger crypto enthusiasts who supported Trump only to watch his family haul in enormous sums from their crypto ventures while several Trump-linked investments plummeted in value.

• Adding insult to injury, the Washington Sun reports that  GetTrumpMemes.com is promising invitations to ‘an evening at his members-only club, Trump National Washington D.C., with 3 Legends and President Donald J. Trump for the 185 largest holders of the Trump Coin. The top 29 purchasers will be invited to an additional ‘VIP Reception with YOUR FAVORITE PRESIDENT,’ while the 4 biggest will also receive an 18-karat Trump-branded gold watch. “The winners will be chosen based on a formula that seems designed in part to increase sales of $TRUMP in the next two months,” the Sun said, noting that Trump’s meme coin has already earned him $635 million from the venture since it started in 2025, while purchasers of Trump’s crypto products have lost an estimated $4.7 billion combined thus far.

• President Trump’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has opened an investigation into Nike over the company’s racial diversity hiring and promotion strategy. Trump has objected to Nike’s marketing campaigns around social justice.

• In an unprecedented move, Melania Trump has earned over $18 million since 2024, according to federal financial disclosure reports released in mid-2026. with $10.71 million from an Amazon MGM Studios licensing agreement for her self-titled documentary, Melania. and over $6 million ($6,011,259) from digital assets and collectible sales, which surged significantly from prior years.

• Over 5 million Americans, or 13% of beneficiaries, have lost SNAP benefits following the implementation of strict federal rules from the Republican’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

• During his second term, Trump’s administration has systematically targeted the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) through budget cuts, staff reductions, and the termination of major climate research programs. The agency has lost roughly 20% to 30% of its staff due to firings and early retirements. Only after intense public pressure and bipartisan backlash from lawmakers and scientists did the administration halt a plan to dismantle the $368 million Ocean Observatories Initiative , which would have removed over 900 deep-ocean sensors and high-tech data buoys. Trump has also proposed major cuts to research funding at the National Science Foundation across all its directorates and halting funding for the Arctic Report Card, a longstanding effort to synthesize the latest research about the fastest warming place on Earth. Meanwhile,in another part of NOAA, NOAA Fisheries, the arm of NOAA tasked with overseeing commercial fishing, is facing a budget cut of more than 40% in the fiscal 2027 budget proposal. That would result in cuts to science programs, fisheries management and data collection.

• In a September 28 interview with Time magazine, Trump was asked, “Would you rule out declaring a state of emergency in the lead up to the midterms unless there’s widespread violence in the streets? Trump: replied, “I don’t rule anything out or in. We’ll see. You mean the Insurrection Act? TIME: Yeah. Trump: No, I’ve never used it. I could use it. A lot of people think I should use it sometimes.”

• Trump went on to laud his intellectual superiority in the Time interview. “I have the highest of IQs. I have the highest. I’m fine, and I understand that stuff,” he said in a rambling statement. “You know, my uncle was at MIT for 41 years, and you know, I’m a—I believe in genetics, frankly, and I understand. I understand it much more than I think any president would, because I do have an ability on this. I have an ability on those things that were the new frontiers.”

• In the same Time magazine interview, Trump repeatedly declined to rule out demolition of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Asked if he would commit to not bringing in wrecking balls to demolish the building, he respond, “I’m not committing to anything. We’re going to see how it plays out in court.”

• Noncitizens residing in the United States who faced removal proceedings have traditionally been eligible for bond hearings. As independent journalist Anthony Davis has pointed out, So long as an individual could demonstrate that they posed neither a public safety threat nor a flight risk, immigration judges regularly permitted them to remain at home with their families while their legal cases progressed. The Trump administration discarded this standard, reinterpreting the Immigration and Nationality Act to dictate that any migrant who entered the U.S. without authorization must be subjected to mandatory, un-bondable detention until their case resolves. In short, asylum, protected under international law, has been criminalized in America.

• On September 15, 2026, ICE removed thousands of immigrants with final deportation orders from its public detainee locator, eliminating the ability of lawyers and families to find where many are being held. If lawyers can’t find their clients they can be deported before an attorney or court has a chance to intervene. More than 30 human rights groups asked a UN panel to intervene. The change affects more than 16,000 people.

• The federal Fiscal Year (FY) 2026 ended October 30. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates the FY 2026 Deficit will total $2.0 Trillion, with interest, at over $1 trillion, representing the second largest expenditure in 2026. “The country’s future fiscal outlook is even more dismal,” the Committee says. With annual debt payments of more than $1 trillion a year, it is inevitable that the cost of servicing the US national debt will start to cut deeply into other government programs.

• Arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement this summer soared to record highs since the start of this Trump administration — with 43,000 in June, more than 49,000 in July and nearly 51,000 in August — as officials cut or narrowed the pathways to legal residency in the United States and expanded the pool of people eligible for deportation, according to the new York Times. Federal agents appeared in nearly every corner of daily life, carrying out operations at hospitals and airports, outside suburban schools and along rural construction sites and truck stops. They fanned out from coastal cities in Maine to desert towns in Arizona, across the open plains of Wyoming and down through the southern borderlands.

• On September 29, the Supreme Court cleared the way for the Trump administration to deport immigrants to third countries where they have no ties, with little or no notice and no meaningful chance to object. In a 6-3 decision, the Court put on hold U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy’s ruling that the policy is unlawful until the justices consider the case, with arguments set for December.  The Trump administration has authorized or pledged at least $410 million to facilitate deportation agreements to send immigrants to third countries with 31 countries, mostly in Africa and Latin America, as of the end of June, the Washington Post reported on September 21, and documents from inside the Office of Remigration (A 1984-ish term if there ever was one) reviewed by The Post show financial commitments that include $81 million in direct payments to 13 of the foreign governments. More than 23,000 people have already been sent from the United States to 26 countries other than their own in 2026, including large numbers of children and adolescents. The Supreme Court’s decision means the current deportation policy can remain in place for months because the court won’t hear oral arguments on the case until December, likely leaving a decision until 2027.

• The Treasury Department and the IRS have proposed a rule that would revoke tax-exempt status from private schools—everything from elementary schools to universities—that offer “targeted support to Black or other minority students,” including assistance offered to minority students, such as minority student clubs and mentoring programs. 

• With the US military already stretched, American soldiers recently  joined a police operation in Ecuador against a cartel. Eighteen Latin American nations have joined a new U.S.-led coalition against cartels, and at least three of them — Colombia, Guatemala and Ecuador — have already agreed to joint military operations with the Pentagon.

• The One Big Beautiful Bill Act helped roughly triple the ICE budget, allocating $45 billion for building new immigration centers and hiring 10,000 new ICE agents. “One dispiriting lesson of the imperial boomerang is that, once. bought and paid for, structures of intimidation and oppression tend to endure,“ said David Wallace-Wells.

• U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has spread its detention center tentacles across the United States. Most of us know the names of a few Nazi concentration camps, like Dachau,  Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, where Anne Frank died. But they were part of a massive complex of more than 850 ghettos, concentration camps, forced-labor camps and extermination camps CNN has identified. They stretched from France and the Netherlands in the west to Estonia, Lithuania and Poland in the east that the Nazis established during the 12 years Adolf Hitler was in power. Their purpose — to  segregate  , oppress and persecute their opponents. Like the ICE detention centers, the Nazi system started small and then metastasized like a cancer, according to the Wiener Holocaust Library. 
  
• The Trump administration, defying Congress, has stripped tens of millions of dollars in U.S. military assistance from European and Middle Eastern countries and will give those funds instead to conservative-leaning governments in Latin America, according to The Washington Post. Some of the money was included in a Ukraine supplemental bill specifically for countries affected by the war in Ukraine.

• The Trump administration has largely halted direct financial and military aid to Ukraine, shifting the main burden of support to Europe, while upending the US approach to the invasion of Ukraine and treating Russia increasingly not as an adversary, but an ally.

Two more years of this?

New York Magazine writer-at-large, Frank Rich, recently shined a light on the people collaborating with Trump. American titans of finance and tech and the law, such as Jeff Bezos, Scott Bessent, and Todd Blanche, have “enabled a kleptocracy that might make Suharto and Marcos look like shoplifters,” Rich wrote. “What’s curious is that they seem so nonchalant about it all, as if no reckoning were coming,” said Ryu Spaeth, features editor at New York Magazine “As Frank shows in this brilliant and forceful essay, history suggests otherwise.”

When, or if, all this is over, will all of its co-conspirators and enablers, who now seem to eagerly embrace the law of the jungle, seek the shield of the rule of law? Don’t be surprised.